Pauline Hanson's gift to democracy

Hanson's experience shows the forces that will rise up against true grassroots participation in our political process, writes Tim Dunlop. Whether it is snobby put downs of her wide-ranging ignorance or more concerted efforts of legal attack, there is a powerful network of vested interests who have no interest at all in advancing the cause of democratic participation.

No-one who takes the idea of democracy seriously, who believes that ordinary citizens should be involved in political decision making at all levels, who believes in participatory democracy and who believes that societal ends are a work in permanent progress to be contributed to endlessly by people from every stratum of society can have anything but admiration for Pauline Hanson's intervention in Australian politics.

She did exactly what the theory said she should do - take herself out of her comfort zone and try and have an influence on matters social and political.

In so doing, she put paid to the pernicious idea that "ordinary punters" are not interested in politics, the self-serving mantra pedalled by the media and the political elite that "ordinary Australians" are disengaged and apathetic. She formed a party, she held rallies, gave speeches - in short, she built it and they came. Her demise should be a concern to all of us.

I disagreed with nearly everything she said and with the broad thrust of her politics. I abhorred her xenophobia, her authoritarianism, and her glib contempt for expertise. But in a sense, so what? My views on her actual politics should be easily separable from my views on her worth as an engaged citizen, just as my feelings about the righteousness of her current gaol term should be separable from my views about her political fate.

I certainly do not buy into the Pauline-as-martyr nonsense that has circulated since her imprisonment, but it is still true that she presented a risk to an entrenched power-base within Australian politics and that she quite simply had to be taken down, one way or another. So while eschewing the conspiracy-theory option, we would just be plain bloody naive not to recognise that the sort of impact she was able to have as a complete outsider was a threat to a system that prefers to work through anti-democratic and semi-secretive intra-governmental organisations and mechanisms like COAG, the Council of Australian Governments (see National policy issues are being debated in atmosphere of secrecy).

Both left and right pilloried her accent, made fun of her ignorance and, from the national media through to the national parliament, did everything in their not insubstantial power to make her a laughing stock. Some of this was based on a genuine and justified contempt for her policy prescriptions, but too much was generated by revulsion of her person and the strata of Australian society to which she appealed.

As we all know, such attacks, for a while anyway, merely added to her allure amongst what we might call her constituency. People easily recognised the mob picking on the outsider and rallied, literally, to her support. And Hanson's allure - for a while she was the most potent force in Australian politics since Bob Hawke's star was ascendant - was not based, as many sneeringly suggested, on an appeal to the so-called latent racism in the Australian population at large. That was always just a convenient scapegoat for a political elite, left and right, who had simply lost touch with, and didn't particularly like, the vast majority of those they purported to represent.

Her appeal was simply that she represented something authentic in a culture of artifact. She was transparent in an era during which the political class have become expert at concealment. She was a stillpoint in a culture of spin.

This was brought home to me at university where I had given a lecture on political rhetoric and had taken the opportunity to make fun, in passing, of Hanson and her unacademic grasp of key political issues. Thought I was pretty funny too. After the class, a student came to my office and complained that I'd been unfair to Hanson and that I should smarten up. It was the fact that student was Aboriginal that pulled me up short.

"Why the hell are you defending Hanson after what she's said about Aborigines?" I asked, or words to that affect.

"You don't get it, do you?", the woman said, and she was right.

Of course, Hanson's greatest strength, her lack of guile, was also her greatest weakness. She fell prey to seasoned opportunists like John Pasquarelli and the two Davids and ultimately to politics-as-she-is-really-fought in the form of John Howard and the Liberal Party for whom she was once an endorsed candidate.

We can see now that even while he was riding her populist coat-tails, the Prime Minister's ideological bovver boys, the likes of Tony Abbott, were seriously plotting her demise. While the PM was making mileage out the "end of political correctness" and was implicitly taking credit for giving voice to "the battlers" who had been oppressed for so long under the yolk of Labor-led "elites" (one of the great misnomers of our recent political history), constructing a rhetoric of populism and involvement built on his own faux-credentials as a man of the people, members of his own party and circle were hell-bent on crushing the real McCoy. He gave her enough rope to hang herself which also happened to be enough rope for an inept Opposition to tie itself in knots it is still trying to undo.

The nature of Hanson's appeal was that it bled votes from the conservative end of the traditional parties and she therefore had to be stopped, no matter where she fitted in the anti-pantheon of Howard's carefully manufactured battlerdom.

Of course Hanson made mistakes and was in many ways her own worst enemy. I still abhor the broad thrust of her opinions, (though I suspect she herself learnt a lot during her time in politics and might no longer be capable of easy platitudes of her infamous first speech to parliament).

I have no problem with her incarceration. I think there is a lot of truth in Mark Latham's comment that many of those demanding leniency for Hanson (including Hanson herself) have been less than willing to consider mitigating factors in other sentencing decisions, and perhaps it will make such law-and-order zealots a little more mindful about the quality of mercy. Besides, as Graham Young has pointed out, there isn't even anything particularly harsh or unprecedented about her sentence.

And yet, her experience shows the forces that will rise up against true grassroots participation in our political process. Whether it is snobby put downs of her wide-ranging ignorance or more concerted efforts of legal attack, there is a powerful network of vested interests who have no interest at all in advancing the cause of democratic participation. There are many who are positively scared of it and many who are repulsed by it.

So, for all her failings, at some level she advanced our politics even if it was only to the extent of showing us what we might be up against if we choose to get involved as she did. Maybe others will learn from her mistakes.

In short, if you take the idea of genuine participatory democracy seriously then you simply have to take Hanson seriously. And her fate (by which I don't mean her current gaol term) at the hands of the political class should give everyone who harbours any commitment to genuine grass-roots politics serious pause. At that level at least we should be appalled at how she was treated.

And geez, wouldn't it be nice if the "next Pauline Hanson" was of the left?

This piece was first published at roadtosurfdom, the weblog of former Webdiarist Dr Tim Dunlop, who did his doctorate on the role of the public intellectual in democratic debate. Tim's most influential Webdiary piece was Pull the udder one, which disproved the economic rationalist public case for dairy deregulation.